1924 Babe Ruth First Home Run of Season Game Used & Signed Bat
with Extraordinary Provenance, PSA/DNA GU 10....

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Description

The Bambino derails the Big Train at the height of their collective powers...

1924 Babe Ruth First Home Run of Season Game Used & Signed
Bat with Extraordinary Provenance, PSA/DNA GU 10.

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable
object?

Historians have traced the paradox back to a third century B.C.
Chinese text, Han Feizi. It's a matter of philosophy rather than
physics, a purely theoretical consideration free from the grasp of
the scientific method. But we do know what happens when the sport's
greatest offensive and defensive weapons, inaugural class Hall of
Famers each six months removed from his own franchise's first World
Championship, turn their peerless skills loose upon the other.

That moment came in our nation's capital on April 20, 1924 when New
York Yankees' superstar slugger Babe Ruth stepped into the batter's
box, trailing the Washington Senators ten to one in the eighth
inning, to face the scalding heat of Walter Johnson's fastball.
While the Senators would win the war this day, it was Babe Ruth who
took the battle, depositing the Big Train's offering into the
Griffith Park cheap seats to record his first of an American
League-leading forty-one home runs for the 1924 season, and the
239th of his fabled career.

A year earlier, Ruth's first home run of the season had likewise
been the first in the history of Yankee Stadium, creating a relic
that would one day produce just the second seven-figure result in
sports collectibles auction history. The $1.3 million sale price in
2004 would represent just a small fraction of that bat's current
value were it to return to the block after a decade and a half of a
bull hobby market. It's one of the most famous and desirable
baseball relics in private hands, still to this day the world
record holder for the highest price ever realized for a game used
bat at auction.

The offered specimen was virtually unknown to the collecting
community until just a few years ago, a lost sibling of that
long-reigning titleholder and the most serious threat to its
financial dominion.

Those veteran hobbyists who recall the enormous fanfare that swept
the 1923 model into the record books know that the bat's provenance
tracked back to multiple newspaper stories both preceding and
immediately following its presentation. This voluminous period
documentation was by design, the brainchild of pioneering sports
agent Christy Walsh, perhaps the only man of sports' Golden Age as
influential to the evolution of his chosen profession as his star
client.

It was Walsh who saw the opportunity to expand Ruth's influence
west of the Mississippi, to spread the gospel of the Babe to the
half of the continent too far-flung from Big League parks to
witness the unbridled power of the Home Run King in person. We see
his efforts in ghostwritten syndicated columns, in silver screen
appearances, in the legendary Bustin' Babes vs. Larrupin' Lous
barnstorming tours.

And we see it in Ruth's first home run bats of the 1923 and 1924
seasons.

Each bat had been promised to the leading high school slugger of
Walsh's hometown of Los Angeles, a contest prize for the boy with
the highest home run tally and highest batting average
respectively. Walsh had begun his career in sports as a reporter
and cartoonist for the Los Angeles Evening Herald in 1912, and it
was through this publication that the contest was promoted and run.
The 1924 bat was consigned along with winning batter Phillip
Grossman's personal scrapbook containing a surprisingly large
quantity of newspaper articles with headlines like, "Home Run
Bat Up for Best City Loop Average" and "Grossman Gets Lead
in Race for Trophy." Best is a photo of the youngster posing
with Ruth underscored by text which reads, in part, "This photo
shows Babe Ruth of the N.Y. Yankees and Phil Grossman just after
the Bambino had congratulated Jeff's heaviest hitter on his recent
visit to Los Angeles. The Evening Herald offered a bat autographed
by Ruth to the player in the City League getting the highest
batting average, and Phil obliged that paper by relieving them of
the ash."

Just five years short of a century later, that bat reemerges on the
public stage, poised to add one more record to Babe Ruth's endless
catalog thereof. The signature model Hillerich & Bradsby
appears in Ruth's workhorse R2 model format, the thirty-six inch
(36") length and wrist-straining forty-two ounce (42.1 oz.) weight
amplifying its status as one of the most lethal weapons ever to
terrorize a Major League pitcher.

The bat is uncracked and exhibits game use characterized by leading
expert John Taube as "outstanding," suggesting that this was likely
the sole bat used by Ruth until he fulfilled his long ball promise
in the fifth game of the season. Ball marks, stitch impressions and
cleat divots speckle the battle-scarred relic, and a small chip is
dislodged from the back barrel.

Like its celebrated elder sibling, this is an artifact of our
national pastime that provides every hallmark of elite Ruth
lumber-monumental significance, plentiful game use, a bold
autograph and ironclad provenance. As Roger Maris taught us in
1961, even the greatest of records is made to be broken, and the
smart money is on this bat, as a wager before the auction and as an
investment check when the invoice comes. LOA from PSA/DNA, GU
10. Grossman's personal scrapbook.Full LOA from PSA/DNA(autograph).